Statement

The Hyperstitional Pavilion of Iran on the occasion of the 61st International Venice Biennale, presents Hulul: On Incarnation and Incantation, facilitated by Perpetuum Mobilε (PM) on behalf of Iranian artists and curators at risk. Curated by Pouya Jafari and Nazli Jan Parvar, the pavilion represents a group of Iranian artists—Real Iran, Dast Dastan, Zendan-e Eskandar, Mogh Kouh, and Dorna—from across generations and geographies. As the face of Iranian art unanchored from site, architecture, and state in these troubled times, this hyperstitional Pavilion of Iran presents a novel intervention at the Venice Biennale 2026, conceived as a living, breathing constellation of national display. It explores the intertwined logics of embodiment and utterance; how forms inhabit bodies, and how words, gestures, and images call worlds into being. The Pavilion imagines haqqitat (the real) before it becomes a coordinated place. At a moment when borders are simultaneously fortified and dissolved, Hulul proposes a different mode of presence: not as a representation of a state, but as a continuous process of becoming. The term hulul, drawn from mystical and philosophical traditions, refers to the descent or indwelling of a spirit within a body. Here, it is mobilized not as doctrine but as method, a way of thinking about how histories, languages, and imaginaries pass through forms, inhabiting them temporarily while transforming them in turn. The exhibition approaches Iran as a territory shaped by resistance, rupture, and azadi-khahi. Through spatial arrangements that displace the viewer, immersive environments that challenge physical boundaries, and visual works that articulate speculative narratives, the pavilion constructs a shifting terrain of encounter. Visitors move through situations that alternately gather and disperse them, situating perception itself as a site of negotiation. Rather than foregrounding monumentality, Hulul operates through acts of invocation. Works emerge as incantations; calls that summon presences across time and space, binding together fragments of memory, myth, and contemporary experience. These gestures resist closure, insisting on multiplicity and resonance over singular meaning. What is at stake is not the display of identity, but the activation of relations: between bodies and voices, present and future, here and elsewhere. Throughout the Biennale, the pavilion is sustained by a network of collaborators and interlocutors whose practices extend beyond the exhibition space. Their activities, gatherings, transmissions, and informal encounters form an evolving field that exceeds the limits of the pavilion itself. In this sense, Hulul is not only an exhibition but an ongoing process of inhabitation and calling-forth, continuously shaped by those who enter into it. Hulul: On Incarnation and Incantation offers neither a unified image nor a singular narrative. Instead, it proposes a space in which Iran’s multiplicities, historical, imagined and dispersed, coexist and recombine. What emerges is a porous and dynamic condition: a pavilion that does not stand in Venice, but resonates through it, carrying with it the voices of an ancient yet civilization in becoming.